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by bee_rider 434 days ago
It seems like a neat idea. If it can just be layered on top of Jax pretty easily… I dunno, seems so simple it might actually get traction?

I wish I could peek at the alternative universe where Numpy just didn’t include broadcasting. Broadcasting is a sort of ridiculous idea. Trying to multiply a NxM matrix by a 1x1 matrix… should return an error, not perform some other operation totally unrelated to matrix multiplication!

1 comments

Broadcasting is an excellent idea. Implementations do have warts, but e.g. pytorch would be really painful without it.

Broadcasting is a sort of generalization of the idea of scalar-matrix product. You could make that less "ridiculous" by requiring a Hadamard product with a constant value matrix instead.

Scalar-matrix multiplication doesn’t seem that weird; automatically converting a 1x1 matrix to a scalar is the weird seeming thing, IMO.